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del.icio.us Digg It!  new The lecturers' striking failure By Haaretz Editorial Tags: SSTA, strike, lecturers  The senior faculty strike at the universities, which yesterday entered its seventh week and is expected to escalate today on some campuses, seems increasingly to be an unfortunate story of failure, stemming mostly from obtuseness and irresponsibility. Even those who are sensitive to the protest of the senior lecturers - whose pay has indeed eroded over the past decade - will find it difficult to identify with the way they are conducting their struggle, especially when they come ostensibly to make charges about the insulting decline of higher education. The gap between the lecturers' calculation that their pay has eroded by no less than 35 percent since 1997, or 15 percent since their last agreement was signed in 2001, and the Finance Ministry's contention that this erosion amounts to no more than 2.9 percent is, to say the least, surprising. The public has not received a detailed explanation about this. The government has also proposed compensating the senior lecturers with a 5 percent pay hike, equal to that which all public-sector workers have received - while the lecturers, with what seems to be remarkable insensitivity, continue to demand much higher compensation. Advertisement However, the failure of the senior faculty strike goes deeper: The Secondary School Teachers Association has managed to persuade people that it is fighting not only for its members' bread and butter, but also for the very future of the educational system, a matter that touches every citizen. But the lecturers preferred not to join the recent mass rally for education, and not to identify with the teachers. They never considered trying to explain to the broader public what problems the universities face that affect all of society. Thus 4,500 senior lecturers sit at home, united by collective wage agreements with the government and thus able to declare, somewhat scornfully, that they can strike "for many more months." They lament the erosion in their salaries and expect the students to join their struggle. Meanwhile, thousands of junior faculty members continue to teach. These people, who account for 47 percent of all lecturers in institutions of higher learning, are employed as subcontractors and have no rights. They will not enjoy the fruits of the strike, even if it is a rousing success. It may be assumed that the strike will not end that way, but rather with a compromise on the proposed 5 percent increase. The senior staff, now making excuses for what they say was the bad agreement they signed in 2001, by citing inflationary and security pressures, will not be able to blame anyone but themselves: for not using their status to wage an uncompromising struggle against the decline in higher education; for allowing the institutions to be managed by outmoded methods; for not protesting when hiring was frozen; for the shameful exploitation of underlings; and - most of all - for going out on an inexplicable strike that seem to be about concerns over their own individual situation. The result is sad: The next time discourse ensues in Israel over the situation in academia, the most enthusiastic defenders of institutions of higher learning will find it difficult to deal with the damage that this strike has wrought in terms of alienation. Bookmark to del.icio.us Muslim about face A key U.K. Muslim group ends its boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day. Calling all Aleppo Jews Yad Ben-Zvi is calling for the return of centuries-old Aleppo Codex fragments.

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